Did Twitter just drop the bomb on the Russians?
Today many technology executives will testify to the Senate Judiciary subcommittee about the influence of Russian disinformation campaigns online. We might just have had a sneak peak at what Twitter has to say.
Yesterday one of my coworkers noticed a massive change in the number of impressions on his Twitter account over the last year or so. The numbers didn’t suddenly decline over the course of a few weeks or anything normal like that.
The impressions just changed completely, like Twitter had gone back with whiteout and changed ever single number. I help manage more than a few Twitter accounts for brands and other staff members and lo-and-behold, the story was the same everywhere. Here’s just what I saw.
Sometime in early October I used Twitter’s Analytics page and exported them as excel sheets. I still had the files so I was able to compare with what’s live on my analytics page now, and wow.
August saw the largest change, almost 3.5 million impressions wiped off the board.
Every single month was adjusted downwards, to the tune of millions of impressions. I haven’t yet checked closely, but follower counts seem unaffected and I was unable to check on engagement numbers, but impressions seem to tell an interesting tale.
Either Twitter’s algorithm broke, they completely changes what an “impression” is and didn’t tell anyone, or it was all the Russians.
Early reports from CNBC suggest Twitter is about to reveal more than 36,000 fake Russian accounts, and perhaps more. These accounts sent more than 1.4 million tweets and Russian accounts reached 126 million users on Facebook. This comes on the heels of Twitter’s decision to prohibit Russian backed media companies from advertising on their platform.
For those of us that make our living on digital platforms, it raises tough questions about measuring the effectiveness of online communications. What happens if Facebook and Google make similar changes?
Have you seen similar changes in impressions over the last few months? Am I taking crazy pills?
And just how long until social media is just robots talking to robots?
